Director: Ethan Coen
Writers: Ethan Coen, Tricia Cooke
Stars: Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza, Chris Evans
Synopsis: A dark comedy about small-town private investigator Honey O’Donahue, who delves into a series of strange deaths tied to a mysterious church.
There is a prestige and guarantee of quality when a film has the name ‘Coen’ attached. The Coen Brothers have made a plethora of cultural driving, envelope pushing cinematic masterpieces and if you are reading this it really doesn’t need any introduction. No Country for Old Men is often cited as one of, if not, the best film of the 21st century so far. So when I tell you that Honey Don’t!, a comedy noir made by one of the guys that essentially mastered the genre is one of the sloppiest and worst movies of 2025 you may have to suspend your belief a little bit. But it is 100% true, Honey Don’t! is an irredeemable mess of a film and I cannot in good faith recommend it to you.
Honey Don’t! follows private investigator Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) as she investigates a string of strange deaths that are somehow linked to a religious cult led by leader Drew Delvin (Chris Evans). A lot of elements of No Country for Old Men is pulled into Honey Don’t!, the central protagonist is walking into the lions den whether they know it or not. However, No Country for Old Men had Anton Chigurh, and the closest thing to that in this movie is delegated to a side character that holds much more intrigue than whatever is presented here.
What’s difficult about these mystery crime thrillers is the ‘central mystery’. The goal of subverting your viewer’s expectations reign supreme and creating an experience that is wholly one of one. Unfortunately, Honey Don’t! swings too hard for subversion that it lands with a whimper rather than a bang. Rather, the drive is on gender politics and homosexuality – which has a lot of potential in and of itself – but only ever graces surface level ideas and never seeks to dig deeper than a “I have a vagina, and I vote” bumper sticker.
Honey Don’t! has a bizarre oversaturation of sex and nudity. Which does have a place in the story being told but it’s never done in service of the overall film, but rather comes off as some fetishized fantasy brought to film. Yeah, if you want to watch Chris Evans have a ton of sex or watch Margaret Qualley and Aubrey Plaza go at it – have fun! But it’s a major missed opportunity, the movie is not freaky enough to satiate the level of debauchery, and the sex is too much for a plot as vanilla as this.
‘Continuity errors’ in films can be such a lame criticism, but in this case it is a major eye sore. Multiple instances where hair and outfits were different shot by shot, a bloodied arm looking through a book without any form of violence occurring previously, nothing seems to work in conjunction with each other – a shotty job on all fronts. It seems this movie was phoned in by the creatives up top and the actors roll with what they’re given. And each of the actors in the film are fine actors, but it’s unfortunate they’re given this material.
But the worst aspect has to come from its oversaturation of ideas. It’s as if every idea is trying to cram through a door all at once and in that nothing comes through. Ideas of abuse, body ownership, sexual desires, sexual manipulation, conservative isolation, religious fanaticism all squeezed in without any tact or nuance. The vehicle in which they decided to explore those themes had the potential, and anyone’s excitement for this movie is not unwarranted. There is something under all of the gristle that could’ve hit much harder, but unfortunately we’ll never see that film.
By the time the credits roll on Honey Don’t!, you’re already forgetting what had happened right before you watched it. This movie is 89 minutes of messy nonsense, and all you are left with is a terrible twist and an excuse to spend an ungodly amount on an ICEE. Even with its immense sex scenes, you can’t watch this on FX or AMC in a few years, there is no real avenue to see this unless you specifically seek it out. I still have immense reverence for Ethan Coen as a filmmaker and I’ll still go see whatever he puts out, but this is a gargantuan miss. Here’s hoping the next one is better (much better, hopefully).
